We've got urban flooding here in San Francisco. The Great Highway (runs along the farthest west edge of the City, just off the coast...wave to the Pacific as you drive by) is closed indefinitely until they clean up the mess. The main drive through Golden Gate Park is also closed. And it's still raining tonight. So much water on my roof that the weight forced a crack down inside a wall, and the result is an enormous growing puddle in a VERY awkward place in my garage...around the base of my heater! Yikes! The good news is that this storm dumped a LOT of needed water into some of the cisterns and reservoirs around northern Cal, and that will provide some short term relief from this ongoing drought year. It's a start...but somebody tell Mother Nature she didn't have to do it THAT fast! Just a return to a normal weather pattern would have been nice, thanks very much...

We don't stop playing because we grow old.We grow old because we stop playing.-- George Bernard Shaw

We're having a fairly typical mid-Atlantic winter. Temps usually mid to high 30s. Perhaps a bit more precip than usual but mostly light snow/freezing rain. The "polar vortex" made for a bone chilling couple of weeks. One morning early in January we had what was called a "freezing fog". That was fairly weird.

I'm enjoying it all because I remember where I was and what I was doing this time last year.

“We must not always talk in the marketplace,” Hester Prynne said, “of what happens to us in the forest.”-Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

Ezra Lb. wrote:I'm enjoying it all because I remember where I was and what I was doing this time last year.

Oh, yes, I remember EXACTLY where I was and what I was doing on this very day, February 10th, late in the afternoon, a year ago. I was sitting on my mom's bed, slowly feeding her wedges of navel orange, which she said tasted lovely and sweet, until she had enough. Then she laid her head back on her pile of pillows, and I asked her if she wanted to sleep, if she wanted to visit great grandma Catharina in her dreams, and walk through her childhood summers there in sunny lazy El Cerrito once more. She nodded yes, all she wanted to do was sleep, she was desperate for sleep. Then I gave her the first drops of morphine under her tongue, as the hospice nurse had instructed earlier that morning, and I sat across the room in my father's old worn Kennedy rocker and watched her sleep. I remember it all too well...

We don't stop playing because we grow old.We grow old because we stop playing.-- George Bernard Shaw

Hey Rick, no, the Great Highway is the fast drag (seriously, we ran drag races there when I was a teenager) that runs straight and narrow north and south along the edge of Ocean Beach within San Francisco itself. At the north end you start at the Cliff House, take it all the way south for nearly five miles and you find the Zoological Gardens, and then it sweeps inland to end at Lake Merced. Keep going south, however, and it eventually segues into Skyline Boulevard that runs through the little town of Pacifica, then skirts the hills above the ocean as it winds into Highway 1. That's the part you probably remember, and it's indeed a striking bit of road and scenery.

We don't stop playing because we grow old.We grow old because we stop playing.-- George Bernard Shaw